Helena Pedersen, Ph.D.

Helena Pedersen is Associate Professor in Education at University of Gothenburg. Her award-winning research and teaching focuses on how the education system forms our relationships to animals; the role of schools and universities in the animal-industrial complex; and how animals are used as pedagogical resources in public venues such as zoos, popular culture, children’s literature, and more. Helena has published widely in these areas and has been invited speaker at numerous academic and public events in Sweden and abroad. She is author of Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education (Purdue University Press, 2010), the latter which received the Critical Animal Studies Book of the Year Award in 2010.

Her new book project engages psychoanalytic approaches to investigate the roles of animals in an education in crisis, and her recent article, “Post-anthropocentric pedagogies: Purposes, practices, and insights for higher education,” was shortlisted for the Teaching in Higher Education Editors’ Choice Award 2026. Helena serves on the Editorial Board of the book series Critical Animal Studies (Brill) and co-convened the GU-CAS network between 2018-24 (University of Gothenburg’s Network for Critical Animal Studies in the Anthropocene).